Categories: Parenting

Healthy Lunch Ideas for Kids

I consider myself a good mom, but lunch boxes have always been a chore. My son has reactive hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), so we have to make sure he eats healthy meals: making fast, nutritious lunches every morning became quite the challenge! The answer was to purchase a Bento Box and design a series of meals that a ten-year-old can make by himself in under ten minutes. The only gadgetry necessary: a lunch box, a vegetable chopper (we own a Vidalia onion chopper which is safe for kids to use) and a few assorted cookie cutters.

Try making different sandwich shapes with cookie cutters to add variety to lunch. You can make pinwheel sandwiches by spreading cream cheese or peanut butter on a slice of bread, cutting off the crusts and rolling it up, jelly roll style. Slice into 4 pinwheels.

Don’t be tempted to send your child to school with the same boring lunches, even if they are “healthy.” Your child will swap their food in the cafeteria with a friend: that apple you send in every day will be swapped for a chocolate chip cookie, and that nutritious fruit drink will be swapped for a soda (and they’ll never admit it).

Try these nutritionally balanced lunch ideas:

Mixed salad (try spinach, carrots, lettuce, clover sprouts, tomato), frozen berry medley or cherries (will melt by lunchtime but still be cold!), cream cheese topped with chives, Triscuits and a serving of nuts. Provides 11g protein.
Fruit kabobs on cocktail sticks. Pretzel crackers, cheese slices, nuts and a whole grain bun with Tofurky, clover sprouts, lettuce and tomato.
“Make Your Own Sushi” box with cucumber & carrot sticks, sprouted brown rice, nori (seaweed), a piece of fruit (i.e. a Clementine) and a frozen 100% fruit popsicle-thawed by lunch but a nice cold treat. You can make your own shrimp sauce by adding 1 Tbs Vegenaise with 1/8 tsp Asian hot chili sauce.
Mini peanut butter and jelly (100% fruit) sandwiches on Carb Light wholegrain bread, baked Tortilla chips, fresh salsa, and a bagged garden salad topped with chopped tomato.
Fruit medley (i.e. grapes, peaches), Stretch Island 100% fruit leather, medley of popcorn, cashews, Spanish peanuts and Annies’ Wholewheat Bunnies, dill pickle, and Tofurky sandwich.
Bagged garden salad topped with crackers (such as Annie’s wholewheat bunnies), peanuts, strawberry yogurt (fruit juice sweetened) topped with mini chocolate chips, and egg salad on wholegrain bread . Egg salad is so simple to make for a ten-year-old: boil one egg for 10 minutes. Cool under running water. Peel and mash with a fork. Add a teaspoon of Vegenaise and a teaspoon of unsweetened pickle relish.
Cucumber and carrot sticks on a bed of lettuce (don’t forget the salad dressing!); Barbara’s Bakery blueberry fig bars (I like these because they are sweetened with fruit juice, not sugar and are made from whole grains), Horizon organic yogurt and a sprouted wheat pita (which provides a complete protein).